Archive for March, 2015

A friend of mine write some thoughts about printers that are highly pertinent. I’ll let his words speak for themselves.

Curiosity killed the printer

Understanding today, I mean fully understanding, demands a expert in
a huge amount of fields. Something as simple as a refrigerator
requires, for most people, a engineering degree. Looking at something
slightly more complicated in example a microwave you would probably
want a physics major in your back pocket as well. As Isaac Newton
rightfully quoted we are indeed standing on the should of giants. This
puts us in the joyful position of not needing to interpret some deep
meta-physical meaning of why, but rather through empirical studies we
can learn to understand actions and reactions. We can suddenly augment
the works of others, improvise our new lended wisdom to create works
of arts previously unimaginable. This new found way of science led us
to the creation of printers.

In any enterprise there most surely will be a printer available, these
days most likely a multi-functional beast connected to your Wifi and
implementing a fax-over-ip-through-skype-attachment protocol.
The question I pose is simple: Why won’t it work? All printers are
at heart a simple construction. Churning through paper and creating
tiny dots either by burning, or leaving it’s colourfull ink all over
the place.

These wonderful devices that helps us rapidly deforests the planet,
and in return give us the latest news about Miley Cirus and Norwegian
youths terrible score in mathematics, are poorly misunderstood; the
unwanted child of any IT-department. Often not accounted for, left
alone in their own network with no humans ever giving them any love.
It’s gotten so bad that the printers them self jam paper every now and
then just to feel the tender touch of a human a few times a year. They
are truly misunderstood. As the little black box they are, a printer
does nothing but slave away; but for whom?

The need for access, the need to be able to print, from anywhere to
any printer might come as a shock. But for some reason you will find
hundreds of thousands printers online. I don’t know why their there.
Perhaps the printers might have escaped the prison of corporate networks
to go live in the wild. But their diligence come at a price, when the
evil scientists of the world learns the way of the printers, who knows
what will happend? The prophecy once claimed that one day the printers
would rise, and indeed they did; 420 000 of them. How did we let a
technology of something so simple become a weapon of this evil
scientist? These printers that where just looking for a quiet secluded
life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to
whom it is easy to do good. From what it looks the printers might have
been fed to much Tolstoy.

It’s easy for all of us to forget the true nature of things. Printers
in themselves are not dangerous, they just want to live a life in
peace. On the other hand people, especially those who do things don’t
understand – the same people who demanded printers in the first place
- must be thought. It’s easy to brush something of as unneeded, to cut
some corners to make some extra short term income. We are constantly
optimizing everything today, it’s so sad to see people, companies,
and technologies thrown out for the “newer, better version of you”.
Anywhere you turn your head you can learn, not just the actions and
their reactions, but something about how physics, software, society,
or any other subject work at it’s core. You can probably just learn
alot about those plain old people that you see on your daily commute
if you just asked them. They will have much more interesting stories
than your daily news have to tell. We must always strive to ask
question, be bold in our critique and speak our minds. It’s in our
nature to experience, to break, assemble and learn. Most of the things
we surround us with everyday does not give us a deeper understanding
of anything. In fact the over generalization we humans apply to all
things optimizes the amount of knowledge needed to a minimum, letting
us do the important things in life like sharing picture of our newest
composition of milk and cereal.